It does seem to be sold cheaper than China makes it. That is what is putting Chinese solar businesses out of business, that aren't connected enough to the subsidies. Even though they all benefit from the currency manipulation that makes it harder for non-Chinese companies to compete with them.
And what makes you say that cheap Chinese products don't get followed by expensive Chinese products? When has China cornered a market before, as it's doing now with lithium? And when has cornering a market by anyone ever been followed by cheaper products instead of more expensive ones? When has selling below cost ever continued after the competition has been eliminated by it?
Now donating money to Wikipedia is especially powerful. It supports a public benefit org that sticks to its principles of openness, and takes money from GoDaddy which is a scumbag operation. And gives that money to GoDaddy's competitors, which sticks it to GoDaddy some more.
Want to help kill SOPA and the rest of the slaver culture working against us? Give to Wikipedia now. And help pay for all those articles you've been reading, too.
Until the Chinese start to jack up the prices, after they control the market. That's the purpose of dumping (selling below production cost): to destroy competition, opening the door to unrestrained price increases. It's an investment in monopoly.
Solar prices are temporarily dropping rapidly because of Chinese dumping. Chinese companies (that aren't connected enough to maintain subsidies and dump their own panels) are already starting to fold, as are others around the world. After China has the last suppliers standing, they will jack their prices up.
Of course they will do this with Li-Ion, too. They will do it everywhere. That's the kind of unrestrained capitalism a mafioso Communist state can generate.
500,000 batteries a year? Google just activated 37 million Android devices in a single day, 74 times as much. The world would need over 22,000 of these factories to keep up, if that rate persists, as it will soon enogh, for only Android devices. How is this a big deal?
It's good for China and Russia to have mutual trade in high-tech stuff that's cheap. If the world's consumers can be organized to force the two countries to clean up their filthy lithium refining industry (the reason it's cheaper in places like Russia and China), that would clean things up and give Russia and China more work in this productive industry. Which is a good alternative to the gangster alternatives.
And better than the war between Russia and China that has raged periodically for dozens, even hundreds or thousands of years.
There's obviously bribery going on to interfere with this public health program. Either directly in cash or other things of value, or just the promise of career escalation after leaving the FDA to work for the meat industry and its support services.
If our news media weren't even more corrupt there'd be a news story about the bribery. Reporters have had 35 years to cover it.
Any time people tell you that some conspiracy for which there is evidence actually exists cannot possibly be true, because too many people would have to know about it for it to remain secret, consider this story about the Hexagon Project. Consider how many Cold War projects like this one maintained secrecy for so long, until it was declassified decades after its mission was completely obsolete, generations after it was actually operating. Consider that a project like this was kept secret even though everyone keeping the secret had a clear conscience, their project never implicated in moral wrongs like torture, false flag invasion, inside job "Let It Happen On Purpose" self-sabotage or worse.
Then consider the conspiracy evidence you're being asked to ignore on the grounds that the Hexagon Project couldn't possibly have been kept secret. And consider it again.
Note that the demonstrated ability to keep complex, valuable secrets completely hidden for a long time does not create evidence of a conspiracy where there is none. It simply debunks the defense that a conspiracy cannot exist because it could not be kept secret. It can be kept secret. So the evidence, when it exists, can be judged on its own merit.
While I dislike most copyright restrictions that prevent freely downloading articles available only to published subscribers, I don't call that "censorship". And I call those who violate the copyright "pirates", even when I support what they do.
Violating copyright on content the actual content creator circulates only under conditions like purchase is not "beating censorship". When you voluntarily "censor" yourself it's not censorship.
It might also be true that lots of Chinese news that might have interested readers outside China is not covered by reporters or publishers outside China. That is not typically censorship either. It's just the part of the major media cartel that keeps people ignorant to protect its corporate power. It is pretty bad, but it's not censorship.
Censorship is when some entity with power over another prevents that other entity from freely speaking, publishing or expressing themself. It is a much more severe version of what you are complaining about. It is also a policy central to Chinese Communist ideology, as openly taught and fairly rigorously practiced.
Everything you say is also applicable to the US, except we're only 1/4 the size.
And one reason others want to see Chinese people more free is not for the Chinese themselves, but because what keeps them locked down can and will be used to lock down the rest of us. In fact versions of it already are.
Of course the purpose of the Chinese censorship, and of even more severe repression, is to keep the Chinese people from rising up. It's at least as likely that the Chinese people not rising up is because of the effectiveness of the control as it is that they are "morally bankrupt".
FWIW, people who don't care whether other people are tyrannized are "morally bankrupt".
That's not a parallel universe. That's the universe everyone shares. If it were a parallel universe private to only America and Americans, your criticism wouldn't have any meaning.
And of course China calls itself the defender of liberty. Everyone does.
How can China just copy all those $multi-billion companies' sites without any of them suing to stop China? If someone tried to copy them outside of the Chinese bubble, those companies would be slamming them down. They already do, even when the "copies" aren't really copies, just competition. The Chinese people settling for the bubble copies are all potential customers for the originals.
I'm talking trademark, copyright and patent. All being infringed to steal literally billions of customers from the owners. Where are the armies of lawyers?
Our analysis [5] of the smartphone value chain showed that carriers in fact earn gross profits over the life of a typical 2-year contract several times those earned by handset vendors.
Footnote [5] is "The Distribution of Value in the Mobile Phone Supply Chain", which on page 32 shows the Razr Cingular/AT&T making over 3x the gross profit as Motorola. The more recent study citing that one says iPhone patterns are the same as the others, like the Razr.
But neither of those studies give the full complement of comparisons, in comparable terms, necessary to say "Carrier profit X%; Apple profit Y%; Handset vendor profit Z%; Components vendors profit N%". to China And its biggest point is that the China/US trade deficit implications are that the deficit numbers are vastly wrong since China keeps only a small amount of labor revenue from the large total revenue of the devices. But the study doesn't give meaningful details explaining the discrepancy.
This looks like just the kind of BS study that Forbes loves: China isn't so bad, the US is winning, we shouldn't want the manufacturing jobs shipped to foreign competitors that make some American investors much richer - all underwritten by at best incomplete logic.
From my less cursory reading, it looks at how much of the sale price goes to each of: the materials, the assembly labor, and the other labor services delivered by each of the many companies necessary to make the sale. It examines the assembly labor costs to conclude that the labor makes a profit, but a small one, on a revenue share that is the smallest share of any taken.
The "unprofitable" headline is wrong, but it's wrong by degree (across the zero point), not by entire category of what's being analyzed.
AT&T's operating costs don't rise that much on supporting the iPhone. Not nearly as much as Apple's does. AT&T keeps as profit a larger share of its income from the iPhone than Apple does, as well as a larger sized share.
There's a good argument against this study's conclusions, in that Apple's electronics are "iconic" but not the majority of sales even in their own markets, precisely because of the lower margins and more commodified products in the Android share of the market that better fits the Chinese manufacturing model. The study probably has very different numbers for the overall market in which Apple's products compete but fail to win.
This situation is of course is exactly the same as has always been the case with Apple products, since the Apple ][+. Would you make the case on Chinese PC manufacturing using only the numbers from Mac manufacturing?
The Chinese companies aren't able to make the carriers' profit, nor Apple's. I suppose they're not able to make the Korean or Japanese profit off memory, touchscreen and other cutting-edge components, or they would be. So they're profiting where they can: the manufacturing. 2% profit on a premium-priced product selling hundreds of millions of units is pretty good. It's hardly "unprofitable to China" just because it's far more profitable to other countries.
It's a small profit, but that's all they can get. The electronics assembly labor market is global and evidently the most extremely competitive part of the entire supply chain.
I think it's for the profit. The Chinese companies aren't able to make the carriers' profit, nor Apple's. I suppose they're not able to make the Korean or Japanese profit off memory, touchscreen and other cutting-edge components, or they would be. So they're profiting where they can: the manufacturing.
It's a small profit, but that's all they can get. The electronics assembly labor market is global and evidently the most extremely competitive part of the entire supply chain.
I agree with you on all of those jobs policies, whether your criticism of Chinese Communism or of America's capitalism (or rather its anti-laborism).
But how does that undercut the conclusions of the study or its Forbes presenter? The study says that the system gives the vast majority of profits to US business (Apple, iPhone carriers, and a little to other US ecosystem members). All of which is enabled by the economic policies you criticize. I'd say that reforming those policies to honest accounting (and preferably change to honest economics) on both sides of the Pacific would be better for everyone (except the incumbent cronies, but they'd still do well). But the study's facts aren't any different when the political economy context is also considered. The revenues are distributed among the supply chain as the study shows.
The carriers make more. The study showed that the #1 profit share goes to iPhone telcom carriers (AT&T) over a 2 year contract. Which is why the carrier subsidizes the phone, paying Apple directly.
My main takeaway from the article was that carriers must be forced to unbundle phones from network access, to stop oppressing the consumer. Carriers should continue to subsidize upfront HW costs under a longterm payoff contract, but it must not be mandatory (or prohibitively expensive to avoid) for anyone who wants their own phone to buy access to any mobile network, at the same cost rate as a bundled phone does. Just like desktop Internet and voice service. Forcing the unbundling would do for competition, pricing and innovation what the forced unbundling of AT&T (still the one!) did starting in the 1980s, and what the inhibitions of bundling PCs with an ISP did for the Internet.
No, the study explains that they studied Apple devices because 1: they're "iconic" and 2: they do offer strong data that argues against what the authors say are commonly believed myths of benefits from manufacturing jobs lost by the US to China.
There's a good argument against this study, in that Apple's electronics are "iconic" but not the majority of sales even in their own markets, precisely because of the lower margins and more commodified products in the Android share of the market that better fits the Chinese manufacturing model.
But to argue that you'd have to read the study. Instead you'd rather whine about nerd rage, Apple envy, and some made-up conspiracy to get page views. Congratulations! You're a self parody.
First, by "single-player markets" I meant the markets for services/products that a single player creates, with no competitors. Those are fairly easy to identify.
Second, Google's market is the search advertising market. Google's dominance of it allows it to name its price. An investigation of that is worth doing, even though it's not cheap. However, by definition there aren't many investigations of that type, since there's only few markets with such dominance by one company. Those companies all pay taxes, which pay for the FTC. When they are abusing a monopoly advantage it costs consumers, and often potential competitors, a lot more than the investigations cost.
Third, I didn't say competitors would never complain. I said that we can't depend on them complaining, because cartel members and other colluders won't complain.
Fourth, I did not say that cartels include monopolies. I pointed out that cartels have unfair competition among them, which hurts the consumer, but the cartel members won't complain about each other.
Fifth I didn't say consumers are being ignored by the FTC, or anything about corruption at the FTC. I said that the FTC shouldn't have to depend on consumer complaints, because consumers can get damaged by cartels without knowing they are.
My original suggestion has suffered no diminishment by any of your complaints. Every one of your arguments was a straw man, or in two cases just some other fallacy. And your response summarizing them was obnoxious.
Examples of legitimate single-player markets would cost the FTC almost nothing to determine. Part of FTC research is finding competitors and asking whether they face unfair competition. Filtering out the harmless monopolies would cost very little. The first monopoly found that way would pay off all those quick investigations.
Just asking competitors or waiting for complaints isn't really enough. Cartels are full of competitors facing unfair competition, but unwilling to call the cops because they don't want their own unfair competition to be stopped. It's the consumer who the government is bound to protect from cartels, but consumers usually don't know they're facing a cartel, because of the very collusion that makes the cartel.
Well as I said, bugs/quality are one issue that should prevent committing to any "live" branch used for building on actual devices.
But the universality of code is always a call by the project management. There's plenty of code that can be compiled into machines on which it will not run, so long as logic prevents it running there. The extra size of the OS image isn't that big a problem, so long as it's not being executed (and the logic that stops it isn't being executed too much). Generating different versions depending on architecture targets should be a matter of #IFDEF or other conditional compilation at least. It really should be factored into modules, like loadable kernel modules. I personally prefer a microkernel architecture for this reason, but Linux went with monolithic kernels. The kernel build config files should give selection control, including groups per architecture tags. But a little extra that's properly shut off is OK. These gray areas are all delineated by educated guesses by the project management.
My point was only that the framework class libraries in Android are part of the OS, even though that's not the traditional view of Java class libraries. I'm not looking for pure GPL.
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It does seem to be sold cheaper than China makes it. That is what is putting Chinese solar businesses out of business, that aren't connected enough to the subsidies. Even though they all benefit from the currency manipulation that makes it harder for non-Chinese companies to compete with them.
And what makes you say that cheap Chinese products don't get followed by expensive Chinese products? When has China cornered a market before, as it's doing now with lithium? And when has cornering a market by anyone ever been followed by cheaper products instead of more expensive ones? When has selling below cost ever continued after the competition has been eliminated by it?
Now donating money to Wikipedia is especially powerful. It supports a public benefit org that sticks to its principles of openness, and takes money from GoDaddy which is a scumbag operation. And gives that money to GoDaddy's competitors, which sticks it to GoDaddy some more.
Want to help kill SOPA and the rest of the slaver culture working against us? Give to Wikipedia now. And help pay for all those articles you've been reading, too.
Until the Chinese start to jack up the prices, after they control the market. That's the purpose of dumping (selling below production cost): to destroy competition, opening the door to unrestrained price increases. It's an investment in monopoly.
Solar prices are temporarily dropping rapidly because of Chinese dumping. Chinese companies (that aren't connected enough to maintain subsidies and dump their own panels) are already starting to fold, as are others around the world. After China has the last suppliers standing, they will jack their prices up.
Of course they will do this with Li-Ion, too. They will do it everywhere. That's the kind of unrestrained capitalism a mafioso Communist state can generate.
Pedant.
Yes, I know.
500,000 batteries a year? Google just activated 37 million Android devices in a single day, 74 times as much. The world would need over 22,000 of these factories to keep up, if that rate persists, as it will soon enogh, for only Android devices. How is this a big deal?
It's good for China and Russia to have mutual trade in high-tech stuff that's cheap. If the world's consumers can be organized to force the two countries to clean up their filthy lithium refining industry (the reason it's cheaper in places like Russia and China), that would clean things up and give Russia and China more work in this productive industry. Which is a good alternative to the gangster alternatives.
And better than the war between Russia and China that has raged periodically for dozens, even hundreds or thousands of years.
There's obviously bribery going on to interfere with this public health program. Either directly in cash or other things of value, or just the promise of career escalation after leaving the FDA to work for the meat industry and its support services.
If our news media weren't even more corrupt there'd be a news story about the bribery. Reporters have had 35 years to cover it.
Any time people tell you that some conspiracy for which there is evidence actually exists cannot possibly be true, because too many people would have to know about it for it to remain secret, consider this story about the Hexagon Project. Consider how many Cold War projects like this one maintained secrecy for so long, until it was declassified decades after its mission was completely obsolete, generations after it was actually operating. Consider that a project like this was kept secret even though everyone keeping the secret had a clear conscience, their project never implicated in moral wrongs like torture, false flag invasion, inside job "Let It Happen On Purpose" self-sabotage or worse.
Then consider the conspiracy evidence you're being asked to ignore on the grounds that the Hexagon Project couldn't possibly have been kept secret. And consider it again.
Note that the demonstrated ability to keep complex, valuable secrets completely hidden for a long time does not create evidence of a conspiracy where there is none. It simply debunks the defense that a conspiracy cannot exist because it could not be kept secret. It can be kept secret. So the evidence, when it exists, can be judged on its own merit.
While I dislike most copyright restrictions that prevent freely downloading articles available only to published subscribers, I don't call that "censorship". And I call those who violate the copyright "pirates", even when I support what they do.
Violating copyright on content the actual content creator circulates only under conditions like purchase is not "beating censorship". When you voluntarily "censor" yourself it's not censorship.
It might also be true that lots of Chinese news that might have interested readers outside China is not covered by reporters or publishers outside China. That is not typically censorship either. It's just the part of the major media cartel that keeps people ignorant to protect its corporate power. It is pretty bad, but it's not censorship.
Censorship is when some entity with power over another prevents that other entity from freely speaking, publishing or expressing themself. It is a much more severe version of what you are complaining about. It is also a policy central to Chinese Communist ideology, as openly taught and fairly rigorously practiced.
Everything you say is also applicable to the US, except we're only 1/4 the size.
And one reason others want to see Chinese people more free is not for the Chinese themselves, but because what keeps them locked down can and will be used to lock down the rest of us. In fact versions of it already are.
Of course the purpose of the Chinese censorship, and of even more severe repression, is to keep the Chinese people from rising up. It's at least as likely that the Chinese people not rising up is because of the effectiveness of the control as it is that they are "morally bankrupt".
FWIW, people who don't care whether other people are tyrannized are "morally bankrupt".
That's not a parallel universe. That's the universe everyone shares. If it were a parallel universe private to only America and Americans, your criticism wouldn't have any meaning.
And of course China calls itself the defender of liberty. Everyone does.
How can China just copy all those $multi-billion companies' sites without any of them suing to stop China? If someone tried to copy them outside of the Chinese bubble, those companies would be slamming them down. They already do, even when the "copies" aren't really copies, just competition. The Chinese people settling for the bubble copies are all potential customers for the originals.
I'm talking trademark, copyright and patent. All being infringed to steal literally billions of customers from the owners. Where are the armies of lawyers?
Actually it's not clear what it says!
From page 4 of the study:
Footnote [5] is "The Distribution of Value in the Mobile Phone Supply Chain", which on page 32 shows the Razr Cingular/AT&T making over 3x the gross profit as Motorola. The more recent study citing that one says iPhone patterns are the same as the others, like the Razr.
But neither of those studies give the full complement of comparisons, in comparable terms, necessary to say "Carrier profit X%; Apple profit Y%; Handset vendor profit Z%; Components vendors profit N%".
to China
And its biggest point is that the China/US trade deficit implications are that the deficit numbers are vastly wrong since China keeps only a small amount of labor revenue from the large total revenue of the devices. But the study doesn't give meaningful details explaining the discrepancy.
This looks like just the kind of BS study that Forbes loves: China isn't so bad, the US is winning, we shouldn't want the manufacturing jobs shipped to foreign competitors that make some American investors much richer - all underwritten by at best incomplete logic.
From my less cursory reading, it looks at how much of the sale price goes to each of: the materials, the assembly labor, and the other labor services delivered by each of the many companies necessary to make the sale. It examines the assembly labor costs to conclude that the labor makes a profit, but a small one, on a revenue share that is the smallest share of any taken.
The "unprofitable" headline is wrong, but it's wrong by degree (across the zero point), not by entire category of what's being analyzed.
AT&T's operating costs don't rise that much on supporting the iPhone. Not nearly as much as Apple's does. AT&T keeps as profit a larger share of its income from the iPhone than Apple does, as well as a larger sized share.
""Mentioning iAnything causes Nerd Rage." does not argue that the study generalizes from a statistical outlier. It just trolls.
There's a good argument against this study's conclusions, in that Apple's electronics are "iconic" but not the majority of sales even in their own markets, precisely because of the lower margins and more commodified products in the Android share of the market that better fits the Chinese manufacturing model. The study probably has very different numbers for the overall market in which Apple's products compete but fail to win.
This situation is of course is exactly the same as has always been the case with Apple products, since the Apple ][+. Would you make the case on Chinese PC manufacturing using only the numbers from Mac manufacturing?
The Chinese companies aren't able to make the carriers' profit, nor Apple's. I suppose they're not able to make the Korean or Japanese profit off memory, touchscreen and other cutting-edge components, or they would be. So they're profiting where they can: the manufacturing. 2% profit on a premium-priced product selling hundreds of millions of units is pretty good. It's hardly "unprofitable to China" just because it's far more profitable to other countries.
It's a small profit, but that's all they can get. The electronics assembly labor market is global and evidently the most extremely competitive part of the entire supply chain.
I think it's for the profit. The Chinese companies aren't able to make the carriers' profit, nor Apple's. I suppose they're not able to make the Korean or Japanese profit off memory, touchscreen and other cutting-edge components, or they would be. So they're profiting where they can: the manufacturing.
It's a small profit, but that's all they can get. The electronics assembly labor market is global and evidently the most extremely competitive part of the entire supply chain.
I agree with you on all of those jobs policies, whether your criticism of Chinese Communism or of America's capitalism (or rather its anti-laborism).
But how does that undercut the conclusions of the study or its Forbes presenter? The study says that the system gives the vast majority of profits to US business (Apple, iPhone carriers, and a little to other US ecosystem members). All of which is enabled by the economic policies you criticize. I'd say that reforming those policies to honest accounting (and preferably change to honest economics) on both sides of the Pacific would be better for everyone (except the incumbent cronies, but they'd still do well). But the study's facts aren't any different when the political economy context is also considered. The revenues are distributed among the supply chain as the study shows.
Nor for the profit, according to the study.
So what is the reason, as you say there is one?
The carriers make more. The study showed that the #1 profit share goes to iPhone telcom carriers (AT&T) over a 2 year contract. Which is why the carrier subsidizes the phone, paying Apple directly.
My main takeaway from the article was that carriers must be forced to unbundle phones from network access, to stop oppressing the consumer. Carriers should continue to subsidize upfront HW costs under a longterm payoff contract, but it must not be mandatory (or prohibitively expensive to avoid) for anyone who wants their own phone to buy access to any mobile network, at the same cost rate as a bundled phone does. Just like desktop Internet and voice service. Forcing the unbundling would do for competition, pricing and innovation what the forced unbundling of AT&T (still the one!) did starting in the 1980s, and what the inhibitions of bundling PCs with an ISP did for the Internet.
No, the study explains that they studied Apple devices because 1: they're "iconic" and 2: they do offer strong data that argues against what the authors say are commonly believed myths of benefits from manufacturing jobs lost by the US to China.
There's a good argument against this study, in that Apple's electronics are "iconic" but not the majority of sales even in their own markets, precisely because of the lower margins and more commodified products in the Android share of the market that better fits the Chinese manufacturing model.
But to argue that you'd have to read the study. Instead you'd rather whine about nerd rage, Apple envy, and some made-up conspiracy to get page views. Congratulations! You're a self parody.
First, by "single-player markets" I meant the markets for services/products that a single player creates, with no competitors. Those are fairly easy to identify.
Second, Google's market is the search advertising market. Google's dominance of it allows it to name its price. An investigation of that is worth doing, even though it's not cheap. However, by definition there aren't many investigations of that type, since there's only few markets with such dominance by one company. Those companies all pay taxes, which pay for the FTC. When they are abusing a monopoly advantage it costs consumers, and often potential competitors, a lot more than the investigations cost.
Third, I didn't say competitors would never complain. I said that we can't depend on them complaining, because cartel members and other colluders won't complain.
Fourth, I did not say that cartels include monopolies. I pointed out that cartels have unfair competition among them, which hurts the consumer, but the cartel members won't complain about each other.
Fifth I didn't say consumers are being ignored by the FTC, or anything about corruption at the FTC. I said that the FTC shouldn't have to depend on consumer complaints, because consumers can get damaged by cartels without knowing they are.
My original suggestion has suffered no diminishment by any of your complaints. Every one of your arguments was a straw man, or in two cases just some other fallacy. And your response summarizing them was obnoxious.
So in short: you're wrong and goodbye.
Examples of legitimate single-player markets would cost the FTC almost nothing to determine. Part of FTC research is finding competitors and asking whether they face unfair competition. Filtering out the harmless monopolies would cost very little. The first monopoly found that way would pay off all those quick investigations.
Just asking competitors or waiting for complaints isn't really enough. Cartels are full of competitors facing unfair competition, but unwilling to call the cops because they don't want their own unfair competition to be stopped. It's the consumer who the government is bound to protect from cartels, but consumers usually don't know they're facing a cartel, because of the very collusion that makes the cartel.
Well as I said, bugs/quality are one issue that should prevent committing to any "live" branch used for building on actual devices.
But the universality of code is always a call by the project management. There's plenty of code that can be compiled into machines on which it will not run, so long as logic prevents it running there. The extra size of the OS image isn't that big a problem, so long as it's not being executed (and the logic that stops it isn't being executed too much). Generating different versions depending on architecture targets should be a matter of #IFDEF or other conditional compilation at least. It really should be factored into modules, like loadable kernel modules. I personally prefer a microkernel architecture for this reason, but Linux went with monolithic kernels. The kernel build config files should give selection control, including groups per architecture tags. But a little extra that's properly shut off is OK. These gray areas are all delineated by educated guesses by the project management.
Thanks for the clarification on the license.
My point was only that the framework class libraries in Android are part of the OS, even though that's not the traditional view of Java class libraries. I'm not looking for pure GPL.